China Highway Traffic Jam 10-days, 60-miles

[Sumku]

China Highway Traffic Jam 10-days, 60-miles

China people suffering with China traffic jam since ten days, for more than 60 miles, thousands of Beijing-bound vehicles have come to a virtual stop on a highway from Inner Mongolia to the nation’s capital.

The China traffic jam, triggered by road construction, began 10 days ago and could last for three more weeks, authorities said.

Truck drivers said they spent much of that time reading, text-messaging, sleeping and playing cards, authorites won’t setup atleast portable toilets to truck drivers they have only two options hike to a service area or into the fields.

Traffic has been building on the highway since the opening of several Mongolian coal mines, vital for China’s booming economy that this month surpassed Japan’s in size and is now second only to America’s.

The average speed of a car during morning commuting hours in the capital is 14.5 mph and is expected to drop to 9 mph by 2015, according to figures released Tuesday by the Beijing Transportation Research Center to state news media.

Residents in the area have reportedly sought to capitalize on the captive drivers by setting up food and drink stands along the roadway. However a number of the drivers complained about exorbitant prices.

“Instant noodles are sold at four times the original price while I wait in the congestion,” one trucker said, describing the inflated prices caused him to suffer “double blows.”

China has embarked in recent years on a huge expansion of its national road system but soaring traffic periodically overwhelms the grid.

The roadway is a major artery for the supply of produce, coal and other goods to Beijing.

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[Sumku]

China's massive traffic jam could last for weeks

China's massive traffic jam could last for weeks

BEIJING – China has just been declared the world's second biggest economy, and now it has a monster traffic jam to match.

Triggered by road construction, the snarl-up began 10 days ago and was 100 kilometers (60 miles) long at one point. Reaching almost to the outskirts of Beijing, traffic still creeps along in fits and starts, and the crisis could last for another three weeks, authorities say.

It's a metaphor for a nation that sometimes chokes on its own breakneck growth.

In the worst-hit stretches of the road in northern China, drivers pass the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors. Many of the trucks that carry fruit and vegetables are unrefrigerated, and the cargoes are assumed to be rotting.

On Sunday, the eighth day of the near-standstill, trucks moved just over a kilometer (less than a mile) on the worst section, said Zhang Minghai, a traffic director in Zhangjiakou, a city about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northwest of Beijing. China Central Television reported Tuesday that some vehicles had been stuck for five days.

No portable toilets were set up along the highway, leaving only two apparent options — hike to a service area or into the fields.

But there were no reports of violent road rage, and the main complaint heard from drivers was about villagers on bicycles making a killing selling boxed lunches, bottled water to drink and heated water for noodles.

A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.

The traffic jam built up on the Beijing-Tibet highway, on a section that links the capital to the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. The main reason traffic has increased on this partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy that this month surpassed Japan's in size and is now second only to America's.

Although wages remain generally low, auto ownership and gridlock have grown so commonplace that Inner Mongolia authorities restrict cars' movement to alternate days, based on odd or even numbers in their license plates.

The car invasion is widely felt; Guo Jifu, head of the Beijing Transportation Research Center, told a symposium Monday that vehicles on Beijing's roads multiplied by 1,900 per day on average in the first half of this year, Xinhua, the official news agency, reported.

The immediate cause of the traffic jam that began Aug. 14 is construction on one of three southbound highways feeding into Beijing.

Authorities are trying to ease the snarl-up by letting more trucks into the capital, especially at night, said Zhang, the traffic director. They also asked trucking companies to suspend operations and advised drivers to take the few alternate routes available.

"Things are getting better and better," he said, but he added that the construction would go on until Sept. 17.

Alan Pisarski, author of "Commuting in America," said the worst traffic jams in U.S. history tend to be associated with natural disasters, such as people fleeing Hurricane Katrina or the collapse of the upper deck of a freeway in Oakland, Calif., in the 1989 earthquake.

"It took some people days to get home after that one," Pisarski said.

Traffic arrangements built up over generations in the U.S. are lacking in much of China, said Bob Honea, director of the University of Kansas Transportation Research Institute, who has visited China.

"We'll see this problem more and more often. It's true of every developing country," he said.

Honea said the U.S. has never experienced a traffic jam as big as the one now bedeviling northern China, but he noted that traffic in Los Angeles "is pretty bad. It's not a highway, it's a parking lot."

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Authorities are now suggesting that it could be September before the traffic jam would be completely gone.

[Sumku]

China Traffic Jam Could Last Weeks

China Traffic Jam Could Last Weeks

BEIJING—A 60-mile traffic jam near the Chinese capital could last until mid-September, officials say.
Traffic has been snarled along the outskirts of Beijing and is stretching toward the border of Inner Mongolia ever since roadwork on the Beijing-Tibet Highway started Aug. 13. The following week, parts of a major road circling Beijing were closed, further tightening overburdened roadways.

As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, local authorities dispatched hundreds of police to keep order and to reroute cars and trucks carrying essential supplies, such as food or flammables, around the main bottleneck. There, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day. Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city's Traffic Management Bureau general office, said in a telephone interview he didn't expect the situation to return to normal until around Sept. 17 when road construction is scheduled to be finished and traffic lanes will open up.

Villagers along Highway 110 took advantage of the jam, selling drivers packets of instant noodles from roadside stands and, when traffic was at a standstill, moving between trucks and cars to hawk their wares.

Truck drivers, when they weren't complaining about the vendors overcharging for the food, kept busy playing card games. Their trucks, for the most part, are basic, blue-colored vehicles with no features added to help pamper drivers through long hauls.

Truck driver Long Jie said his usual trip from the coal boomtown of Baotou in Inner Mongolia to Beijing, which normally takes three days, was now taking him a week or more. The delay, he said, meant he would have to raise his rates above the usual 12,000 yuan, about $1,765, for a 30-ton truck full of cargo.

Sounding frazzled and tired, Mr. Long, a driver for Baotou Zengcai Shipping Co., said in a telephone interview that the traffic got a little better once he finally made it off the highway.

Though triggered by construction, the root cause for the congestion is chronic overcrowding on key national arteries. Automobile sales in China whizzed past the U.S. for the first time last year, as Chinese bought 13.6 million vehicles, compared with 9.4 million vehicles in 2008. China is racing to build new roads to ease the congestion, but that very construction is making traffic problems worse—at least temporarily.

China's roads suffer from extra wear and tear from illegally overloaded trucks, especially along key coal routes. Coal supplies move from Mongolia through the outskirts of the capital on their way to factories. There are few rail lines to handle the extra load. Though the current massive gridlock is unusual, thousands of trucks line up along the main thoroughfares into Beijing even on the best days.

Beijing is particularly prone to traffic jams because it is a bottleneck point. Drivers from the northwest have to navigate its rings of concentric circular highways to get to coastal ports or to head south. The sixth-ring road is the biggest, and until a new beltway is finished in the next few years, there is no alternative route around the capital.

Also entering the mix is the swell of passenger cars into the city from residents who have had to move farther from the capital to find affordable homes.

Other cities around the world face similar congestion headaches. The worst are in developing countries where the sudden rise of a car-buying middle class outpaces highway construction—unlike in the U.S., which had decades to develop transportation infrastructure to keep up with auto buyers.

A recent study by IBM suggested some of the worst commutes are in Moscow, where drivers reported 2˝-hour delays, on average, when asked about the worst traffic jam they faced in three years. Still, Beijing beat out Mexico City, Johannesburg, Moscow and New Delhi to take top spot in the International Business Machines Corp. survey of "commuter pain," which is based on a measure of the economic and emotional toll of commuting.

The mega-jam on the city outskirts comes as officials warn that downtown traffic in Beijing is steadily worsening. State media on Tuesday reported that average driving speeds in the capital could drop below nine miles an hour if residents keep buying at current rates of 2,000 new cars a day.

At that pace, Beijing will have seven million vehicles by 2015, according to the head of the Beijing Transportation Research Center, and transportation will slow to what it was decades ago when China was known as the Bicycle Kingdom.

Beijing's roads now have capacity to handle 6.7 million vehicles—and that is assuming current restrictions stay in place, such as the one requiring private cars to keep off the road for one day a week. Still, Beijing has half the number of cars of a comparably sized city, such as Tokyo.

The capital greatly expanded its bus lines and subway in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, and work continues to open even more stations. But public transport remains crowded and many who can afford it prefer to drive cars.

Longer term, city planners are pinning their hopes on expanded mass transit, adding subway, light rail and mode dedicated bus lanes.

Link

[gunnut]

Residents in the area have reportedly sought to capitalize on the captive drivers by setting up food and drink stands along the roadway. However a number of the drivers complained about exorbitant prices.

“Instant noodles are sold at four times the original price while I wait in the congestion,” one trucker said, describing the inflated prices caused him to suffer “double blows.”

Yo, bring your own.

[Officer of Engineers]

Gunnut, have you never noticed that you're constipated after eating instant noodles?

[kyli]

Chinese Authorities Move to Ease Jam - WSJ.com

Chinese Authorities Move to Ease Jam



By SHAI OSTER

BEIJING—Emergency measures appeared Wednesday to have eased congestion on a main route into the capital that was the scene of a massive traffic jam that lasted more than 10 days and drew widespread media attention.

View Full Image
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Chinese truckers wait in their vehicles on the highway leading toward Beijing.
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Still, trucks remained backed up at the border between Inner Mongolia and Hebei province, about 150 miles from Beijing, as authorities there held back traffic to help clear a badly blocked stretch of road closer to the city, state media said.

The government set up emergency traffic-management teams to remedy a jam that grew along a stretch of a heavily traveled highway west of Beijing after roadwork started there on Aug. 13, cutting the number of lanes available for drivers.

Roads leading into Beijing from Inner Mongolia—a critical route for trucks carrying coal and other supplies to the capital and coastal ports—have been the scene of serious backups in recent months. There were also multiday jams in June.
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But the most recent traffic snarl was widely reported in China's domestic media, which broadcast footage of frustrated drivers and enterprising locals hawking food and drinks along long lines of stopped trucks.

Local media also carried reports detailing foreign-press coverage of the monster traffic backup, which at some points stretched for dozens of miles.

Despite its rapid economic growth and rising prominence on the world stage, China's government remains sensitive about how it is perceived abroad.

Traffic officials and state media had warned that conditions could remain bad for weeks to come as key arteries undergo repair work expected to last until mid-September.

But official efforts to unblock the roads appeared to accelerate this week. More than 200 police from Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Beijing worked around the clock to break up the jam, state-run China Radio International reported.

Authorities said they asked transport and shipping companies to curtail deliveries of nonessential goods and were offering alternate routes where possible. Officials were also allowing more trucks into the city at night in an effort to reduce the backup outside the capital.

Traffic into Beijing is tightly regulated and vehicles need to have special permission to enter the capital. Checkpoints that ring the city are the scene of near nightly traffic tie-ups as police inspect trucks coming in. But the jams this summer have been especially bad.

The highways connecting Inner Mongolia to Hebei Province and Beijing are the main route used by trucks ferrying coal from huge fields in Inner Mongolia to the furnaces and power plants of Beijing and to eastern ports from where it is shipped further south.

Recently, more coal has been coming from Inner Mongolia. A scarcity of train lines has raised the number of trucks jamming already overcrowded roads.

While the worst of the roughly 60-mile traffic jam on the outskirts of Beijing was easing, state media reported that hundreds of trucks were still idling at the border between Inner Mongolia and Hebei, where authorities had stopped them to let the section of road closer to Beijing clear.

There also were reports of heavy traffic on secondary roads as drivers sought detours around the highway.

The gridlock has drawn attention to the growth in vehicle traffic that has been fueled by the country's rapid economic growth and the government's race to expand the national transportation network. China is building new roads to ease the congestion, but that construction often ends up making traffic problems worse in the short run.

[gunnut]

Gunnut, have you never noticed that you're constipated after eating instant noodles?

Hmmm...I don't think so. But then again, I haven't had the need to eat nothing but instant noodles. I don't each much food at all so I can afford to eat something different.

You know what this news item reminds me of? A Dr. Who episode with the 10th Doctor called "Gridlock."

[EstherO]

Another monster traffic jam was happened last week because of an unexpectedly heavy fall of snow shut down the M-10 highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, the country’s two largest metropolitan areas. It started to fall on Friday, and by the time it stopped, three feet of the white stuff had accumulated.

Some localities took it upon themselves to close exits on the highway, leaving motorists trapped without a way off.

The Russian news agency, RIA Novosti, said the traffic jam stretched 125 miles and involved 10,000 vehicles or more. By early evening on Sunday, all but 34 miles had been cleared. However, reports were still coming in Monday morning of stranded motorists. According to the State Automobile Inspectorate, roads were being cleared at about the rate of three-quarters of a mile per hour.

Read more here: Russian traffic jam stretches 125 miles

[zraver]

Another monster traffic jam was happened last week because of an unexpectedly heavy fall of snow shut down the M-10 highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, the country’s two largest metropolitan areas. It started to fall on Friday, and by the time it stopped, three feet of the white stuff had accumulated.

Some localities took it upon themselves to close exits on the highway, leaving motorists trapped without a way off.

The Russian news agency, RIA Novosti, said the traffic jam stretched 125 miles and involved 10,000 vehicles or more. By early evening on Sunday, all but 34 miles had been cleared. However, reports were still coming in Monday morning of stranded motorists. According to the State Automobile Inspectorate, roads were being cleared at about the rate of three-quarters of a mile per hour.

Read more here: Russian traffic jam stretches 125 miles

Figure 350-400 vehicles per mile per lane. 125 miles of 2 lane highway would be a minimum of 87,000 vehicles. What happened wasn't a traffic jam (too much traffic for capacity) but a road with stranded motorist due to weather.

[Guest]

Now, in our country, it`s too hard to get a driving licence.